Indonesia’s Cloudburst are a wild band, and their music quickly proves awesomely refreshing. When a band can make you sit back with eyes widened multiple times throughout the course of a single — somewhat brief! — record, you know you’ve struck gold, or close.
On their January 4 self-titled release, Cloudburst feel as though they’ve really stumbled across and put on display the full breadth of what they can do with their metallic hardcore framework. They’re contemplative and sinister and noisy and musically careful all in the space of the same nine tracks.
Fundamentally, they feel as though their take on metallic hardcore is utterly more sinister than many, if not all of their contemporaries. Their musical horror never lets up to the point of the utterly devastating vocals proving reminiscent of the noise artists in Endon at times. It’s as if the band’s screamer has truly embraced some kind of animalistic instinct and pressing play on the record lets that instinct loose, leaving it snarling threateningly at the listener. The final refrain “out of control!” feels fitting; that portion has some clean gang vocals behind it but has the deranged main vocal line as its core.
The band accomplish a similar feat with their music, presenting unique drumming patterns, snarling guitar lines and overall creeping ethereal senses of doom as easily they zero in on a riff and beat the living daylights out of it in somewhat more familiar fashion. Their sonic dynamics — and derangement — prove a welcome feature of their work, letting the listener truly immerse themselves in a fresh experience that won’t shake itself easily. The music has a way of creeping up on whoever might be taking it in, and just when you think you’ve got a handle on what you’re listening to, Cloudburst sinks its teeth in somewhere you weren’t expecting.
Not only do Cloudburst surprise the listener with experimentation, they really land those efforts at a unique place that makes the wild ride totally worth it. Cloudburst’s songs feel like if Converge-style music continued its descent into madness — somehow — and the result proves as menacing as you’d expect.
5/5 Stars
Listen below via Bandcamp